A major development in our understanding of non-pertubative gauge theory occurred in 1997, the AdS/CFT conjecture of Maldacena. In particular, motivated by a suggestion of Witten, Jevicki et al. and independently Csaki et al. showed how scalar glueball masses can be calculated via AdS/CFT, once confinement is implemented. Working with Richard Brower, together with a then young colleague at MIT, Samir Mathur, we were able to carry out an analogous analysis generalized to tensor glueballs [1]}. This is by itself an interesting exercise, which I learned greatly from Rich and Samir. Equally important is a paper by Polchinski and Strassler where they explained how point-like power behavior for scattering at large angle can emerge when AdS/CFT is implemented.
Secretly, I was extremely excited; at long last, a promising theoretical framework lay ahead as the basis for the phenomenologically motivated heterotic Pomeron.
